Training Ivy [How The West Was Done 1] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) Read online

  How The West Was Done 1

  Training Ivy

  The railroad thunders into the open wilds of Laramie City, Wyoming, ushering in chaos and psychic upheaval for Deputy Neil Tempest, who is attempting to bring order to the lawless Hell on Wheels town.

  Ivy is the first of four Hudson daughters to break away from her dull life back East. A spinster after caring for her dying mother, she arrives amidst a flurry of strange murders. When the spirit of a rancher's murdered wife sets her sights on Neil, no one can tell if her clues are a help or a hindrance.

  They team up with Captain Harland Park, a dashing adventurer. Booted from the British Army for writing a scandalous report on male brothels, Harley seduces the couple with tales from an Arabian love manual. They take spirit photographs and engage in lively séances, and a whirlwind of prophecies guides them into intrigue and love.

  Genre: Historical, Ménage a Trois/Quatre, Western/Cowboys

  Length: 59,483 words

  TRAINING IVY

  How The West Was Done 1

  Karen Mercury

  MENAGE EVERLASTING

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

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  A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK

  IMPRINT: Ménage Everlasting

  TRAINING IVY

  Copyright © 2012 by Karen Mercury

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-61926-735-0

  First E-book Publication: June 2012

  Cover design by Les Byerley

  All art and logo copyright © 2012 by Siren Publishing, Inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  PUBLISHER

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  Letter to Readers

  Dear Readers,

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  DEDICATION

  For Sir RFB.

  It is almost as well to be subjected to another’s appetite as to your own.

  TRAINING IVY

  How The West Was Done 1

  KAREN MERCURY

  Copyright © 2012

  Chapter One

  May, 1868

  Laramie City, Dakota Territory

  “The bison was wearing earrings!”

  Cornelius “Neil” Tempest whipped his head around. He was in the middle of an important meeting and certainly didn’t need to listen to some cracked pronouncement such as this. But Ezekiel slid into the room, hanging onto the corner of the doorjamb, his face all lit up with excitement, and Neil had no choice.

  “Yes?” Neil inquired wearily. “And bison always wear ladies’ jewelry?”

  Ezekiel slid even farther into the study of Simon Hudson, his boots squeaking. “It was just as Caleb predicted! This gent is a genius, I tell you! He always knows ahead of time when something is about to happen.” Zeke gestured at Hudson behind the desk, who sat there idly sucking on the end of his pen, as though he actually believed in these tall tales. Which he usually seemed to do.

  Neil rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and sighed. The jackass insisted upon continuing. “Didn’t I tell you that Caleb would have a vision? Sure as shooting, he did!”

  Neil tried to clarify the situation. “And Caleb saw a bison wearing jewelry? My, oh, my. I certainly hope it was in the finest Paris fashion.”

  The odd things people pretended to see out here in Dakota Territory. Jokers were constantly interrupting important meetings to inform the general populace that—for example—they had seen a talking crow sitting on the telegraph wire. Telling them something their dead grandmother probably wouldn’t have even said if she was still alive and kicking, such as, “Don’t forget to iron your handkerchief before a big snowstorm.”

  Oh, great balls of fire, as they said in the Far West. As if a person didn’t have enough to think about. Now they had to put down their pens and listen to some out-and-out dough-headed theory about a bison when they were trying to get some work accomplished.

  Yet Simon Hudson, magnate of railroad ties and lumber, was actually listening to this dumbhead. “You say the bison wore earrings in Caleb’s vision?” He turned to Neil and said with the utmost seriousness, “Caleb is often right about these things, my son. Why, he cured the gout in my lower back with some concoction of Indian herbs.”

  Hudson looked into the distance. Neil knew when Hudson started waxing poetic there was no hope of coming to an agreement about what should be done about the outlaws running roughshod over Laramie. As head of security for nearby Fort Sanders, Neil was attempting to form a territorial government to take the lawless elements into hand, to make order out of chaos. The fort had been built to protect overland emigrants but was now delegated to protecting the coming Union Pacific Railroad workers.

  Oh dear Lord! Hudson still blathered! “Now, about these earrings, Zeke. What color would you say they were? Did Caleb tell you? Green, like emeralds? Because my dearly departed wife used to wear emerald earrings. It must be a sign from beyond the grave.”

  Oh, great balls of fire! After suffering some kind of hysterical brain injury during the recent War Between the States, Zeke had come to Laramie with his mentor, Hudson. Hudson indulged the cracked fellow, securing him a position as adjutant for the railroad that would soon be arriving in town, but Neil had no such indulgences to spare for the ridiculous fellow. The person of the adjutant should be fluent in Indian affairs
and at least French and Spanish, but Ezekiel appeared to be from some backwater drugstore in Yankton.

  Neil interjected, “Listen here, Zeke. We’re trying to come to some agreement about what to do with the hoodlum element in this town. Could you possibly step outside for a moment, and we can discuss the splendors of animal toilettes later on?”

  But Hudson sat up straighter in his chair and got a bit huffy. “Now see here, my dear son. There have been many precedents of seers, visionaries like Caleb, predicting the future.”

  “With all due respect,” Neil said gravely, “what could this bison possibly have to do with your departed wife? Aside from the earrings, of course.”

  Zeke insisted, “The earrings were emerald, as a matter of fact! Yes, yes, now that you mention it, Caleb told me they sparkled like the foamy seas right before a storm, so of course that means green and—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Neil exploded and stood, pointing at the carpet. “What are you, a floored lush? Do you know how many women have owned emerald earrings at some point in their lives? What’s the point in getting Mr. Hudson all upset over something that—Oh, now you’ve done it.” Mr. Hudson, instead of staring thoughtfully into the distance, appeared to have fallen asleep with his eyes open. He often did this in the middle of a meeting—fell into a dormant stage that wasn’t quite sleep but definitely wasn’t awake.

  “Come on.” Neil shook Zeke by the arm. “Let’s leave him be.” He led Zeke from Hudson’s study and down the hall. “Now what’s this Hudson just told me about a Union Pacific surveyor, name of Harland Park, coming to town? He allegedly mapped out the route years ago and now is ensuring that nobody has changed it in the meantime—”

  But Zeke was still intent on that damned bison, holding out his hands in a seer’s fashion, his eyes idealistic and wide. “I tell you, Neil. This vision obviously had something to do with Mr. Hudson. Because—listen to this—the bison was sitting over a shield with an engraving of a castle on it. Doesn’t Hudson have something like that on his wall? Isn’t it his family coat of arms?”

  Neil tossed Zeke’s arm away in irritation. “Oh, right! How often do bison sit down next to an Irish shield, for crying out loud? Bison are found only in the United States! Besides, there aren’t any around here anymore. The last eastern herd was decimated. I haven’t seen a bison in three months.”

  They were interrupted by the hollow stamping of heels—a woman’s heels, by how tiny they sounded—on the front porch and a blurry shadow of a head moving behind the opaque window glass. Neil jumped, startled, at the tinny sound of the doorbell but regained his wits to take several long strides and yank the door open. No doubt it was the surveyor Park, who would probably take a room here in Hudson’s stately Vancouver House instead of the seedy Frontier Hotel, where the walls were just paper partitions and the fare offered ran to rusty bacon and coffee boiled into poison. Hudson had no family here in Dakota Territory, but as befitted his wealth he’d built a twenty-room mansion named after a bold explorer complete with a sunroom and a porch that wrapped around three sides of the house.

  A woman was a rare commodity in Laramie City. Surrounded by what seemed like a dozen portmanteaus and carpetbags, this dusty and trembling maiden looked down at her feet, pinching her earlobe between two gloved fingers. She looked up at Neil when he stepped onto the porch.

  And she graced him with the most open, rounded, pleasing vision of a face.

  She was such a fancy article, Neil couldn’t speak. Sure, he’d not had much truck with the female sex. His history being hobbled—imprisoned—in New South Wales had made sure of that. But he was intelligent enough to know that he could go years, another decade, without being graced by such a rare vision. She was all rounded shapes—gently rimmed eyes, mouth as though she’d just eaten a fistful of berries.

  Dust settled on the shoulders of her green velvet jacket, and the dyed feather in her jaunty hat drooped in exhaustion. She was togged out to the nines for evidently having just arrived on the stage. Tendrils of long auburn hair now straggled about her ample bosom, and Neil was struck dumb.

  “Good afternoon,” she panted. Neil spied a boy wheeling a cart away—he no doubt had brought this vision and her luggage. “I see it says ‘Vancouver House’ on the cornice.” She nodded and looked upward, as she still held onto her earlobe. “I’m told this is Simon Hudson’s house.”

  Like a beached fish, Neil opened his mouth but no sound came out. It took that half-witted dumbhead Ezekiel to spring through the entrance and grab one of the beauty’s portmanteaus.

  “Indeed it is!” Zeke affirmed. “Welcome!”

  But she held out her free hand in warning, indicating that Zeke should be still. Zeke froze like a stiff on the receiving end of a necktie party, his fingers hovering above the portmanteau handle. “I’m sorry,” the beauty said apologetically. “But if you could please not move for a moment. I’ve only just now noticed that I’ve lost one of my earrings. Can you help me look around for it? It’s a dangling emerald item—you can see the one on my other ear here.”

  She waggled her head, displaying her earring that dazzled Neil with a myriad of diffracted shards of light. When she smiled, she revealed cunning little teeth like a beaver’s. She seemed to have eyes only for Neil and seemed to speak directly into his dazed soul when she said, “I only just put them on when I arrived at the depot, not wanting to wear them on the stage, as you can expect. I wanted to impress my father—Mr. Simon Hudson.”

  Her father! Hudson had four daughters back East in New York. Neil was finally galvanized into action and fell to the beauty’s feet to feel around for her earring. She lifted her velvet skirts and took a small step aside, the better to assist Neil. If he’d wanted to, he could’ve looked right up the layers of her skirts from his vantage point on hands and knees. Just as this thought shamed him, Zeke was on the porch next to him, feeling around, his bugged eyes fixed on Neil.

  “Did you hear?” he whispered excitedly. “Her emerald earring! What’re the odds of that happening? One in a thousand? This is a sign, I tell you, Neil—a sign from beyond the grave!”

  “Will you please stow it?” Neil snapped. “She’s upset about losing her earring. She doesn’t need the additional distress of listening to you and your rank mouth!”

  But the flatheaded jackass had already shot to his feet, and Neil could hear him clear as day chirping out to the lady, “Miss! I must ask you! Does your family coat of arms, by any chance, depict a castle?”

  “Why yes, it does, Mr.—”

  “Ezekiel Vipham, at your service!”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, it might sound highly irregular, but you’ll soon discover things are done differently here in the Far West, Miss Hudson. You see, there’s this visionary fellow who lives nearby with some Indians, name of Caleb Poindexter…”

  Neil crawled around at Miss Hudson’s feet, enduring the flatheaded bison story again. He shuddered with delight and his prick stiffened when he had the legitimate opportunity to touch her ankle, to soundlessly request she move her boot. When her skirts rustled, they oddly enough emanated a scent of pine. Oh, it was a good thing Hudson didn’t wake from his trance and find his head of security down on all fours under his daughter’s skirts! Even worse would be the penalty if Hudson discovered the nature of Neil’s thoughts.

  He imagined snaking his palm up her gam, clamping it around her well-turned knee. When he lifted her skirts, he’d take a bite out of her billowy thigh, whiter than a clean sheet, just above her stocking. He’d catch her calf between his thighs like a vise, giving her a sign of his well-endowed—so he’d been told many a time—bull’s prick when he humped it against the tender arch of her foot, and—

  “I found it!”

  He’d found his voice as well! Neil gripped the little green gem between thumb and forefinger, digging it out from between the porch floorboards. He was so ecstatic at his accomplishment he completely forgot where he was. As he straightened up to stand an
d proudly hand Miss Hudson the earring, he caught at least three of her skirt hems on the crown of his head.

  For a brief moment, he was looking up her skirts. It was hot under there, steamy and humid, the pine scent mingling with that of fish and dust. The brief glimpse of her drawers so astounded Neil that he fell back on his ass as she whisked her skirts from about his head. He had to blink several times to rid his head of the image of a lace ribbon cinched above a dimpled knee.

  That was an image he’d not soon forget. He really had to pay a visit to the bawdy house soon and dab it up with a few women. His awkwardness around women could really become a liability.

  Chapter Two

  What a day! First, Ivy’s stagecoach had almost been robbed by a bandit, and then she had nearly lost her mother’s emerald earring.

  Now this stranger had found it. Why, Ezekiel’s story about the visionary must be right—something good must be in the air. After all, the earring was now back in her ear. And she hadn’t even known the outlaw was about to rob their stage until a shot had rang out and a fellow on a nearby hillock had dropped to the ground. An unknown Good Samaritan had shot the outlaw from a great distance in the leg so as not to kill him, just scare him off. None of the passengers even knew the story about the Good Samaritan until they’d arrived at the Laramie depot an hour later.

  And this stranger was exceedingly handsome by anyone’s standards, especially those of an old maid such as herself. Something strangely wonderful indeed was in the air. And she’d been oddly stimulated to have a man’s head and shoulders underneath her skirts in…well, for the first time ever.